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It is a pleasure to welcome this paperback edition of Karin Stephen's classic introduction to psychoanalysis which first appeared in 1933. Based upon lectures at Cambridge to an audience made up for the most part of medical students, the book is a model of clarity. Rereading it is not only enjoyable but provocative.
Written at the peak of the freudian era, if one may put it that way, we now read it in a post-freudian period. What developments have we observed since? Are all the basic observations confirmed? Are the main hypotheses and theories totally unaltered? Or has there been noteworthy progress? To attempt answers to such questions would carry us far beyond the scope of a brief review. I should like merely to add a more specific question: Are all the psychogenic symptoms we see or, more narrowly (if the term can still be used narrowly), are all the neurotic symptoms invariably the return from repression of specifically infantile sexual impulses and of none other? Does not all we have learned of ego psychology and of the transference indicate a much broader base, namely, a disorder in personal feelings generated by those responsibile for the child during his earliest years?
One is impressed by how much Karin Stephen described concerning many phases of emotional life, for example, the role of hostility and its relation to guilt. I am only suggesting that reading today a classic presentation of nearly thirty years ago is a stimulating and worth-while experience if one does it with an academically